In our living and in our dying

The name Kayla Mueller has not yet fully emerged into our consciousness as the face of  martyrdom, but it will. Or should. She was the victim of Daesh brutality, presumably execute but certainly killed in their custody, last month.  There is much ink at the moment serving both to remind us of her bravery and to suggest that she was deeply foolhardy, but youth (which most of us have long left behind) was ever thus, and the sheer bravery of this young woman should not ever be forgotten.

More recent even than news of Kayla’s death has been news of the cynical execution of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians. I personally have elected not to see Daesh’s videos of the execution or these martyrs, believing that to do so both plays into Daesh’s propaganda programme and risks that peculiarly Western voyeuristic sin of merging tragedy and entertainment. That sin, for me first highlighted in a 1985 book called Amusing Ourselves to Death, is a tragically western sin. It has come to mean that, en masse, we can no longer differentiate between the blood spattered screens of Hollywood and the blood spattered screens of television news. (Judging by debates raging even on my own Facebook page about Fifty Shades of Grey, which I abhor, we are confused about questions of violence and sexual entertainment, too). On the other hand it is a valid argument that sometimes we should witness brutal realities of human barbarism, to remind ourselves that we are not quarantined from humanity’s propensity for evil.

Humanity’s propensity for evil? I shall be emphasising during Lent that it is my and your, not some abstract “humanity’s” propensity for evil that we must address, as we, in the words of the Ash Wednesday rite, “turn away from sin, and be faithful to Christ.’

I elected not to watch the execution of the Egyptian Coptic martyrs, but have been moved to the core of reports that speak of many of them praying as they met their death. At one level this is a deeply visceral response to brutal and imminent death. But it is also a deeply profound response, a deeply profound witness to resurrection hope, to the Easter message towards which we will travel through a few light privations these next six weeks. In an aggressively rabid atheistic world those simple and terrified mutterings of prayer are a powerful message. God was whispering even in that deepest horror of human inhumanity.

On Ash Wednesday Bishop Andrew Hedge spoke of Lent as practising penitence, practising readiness to encounter the powerful and no longer invisible presence of God in our own death. We are unlikely to encounter the horrors encountered by Kayla Mueller or the 21 Coptic Christians, but many of our sisters and brothers face that daily.  May we embrace them in our Lenten praying. May we pray also that our lives be decreased in clutter and increased in God, so that we may embody those simple hymn words of Roberto Escamilla, and revisited by John Bell, “in our living and in our dying we belong to God.”

 

Where Afric’s sunny fountains?

In the post-Enlightenment era, as Europe became (seemingly) invincible and (seem ingly) great on the back of scientific discovery and method, the God of most church practice became increasingly removed from the grot and squalor of everyday experience.

The God of art became a massive human form, remote and with accentuated muscularity. The God of theology became a champion of national law, (“law ‘n’ order,” in fact), a conservative God who kept the poor in their place and the rich in theirs. Much though we love our national anthem I suggest that it was this God who was expected to defend New Zealand in Thomas Bracken’s words to our anthem, and to save the monarch in Britain’s equivalent. (Australia avoided a god in its anthem, rejoicing in a larrikin spirit of youth and freedom instead).

 

God became an aesthetic God, beautiful and remote and His (definitely His, with a Capital H) Kingdom became a glorious Romantic idyll. Much of our hymnody and choral music reflects this too, with the now thankfully forgotten “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains” perhaps the most lamentable example:

 

From Greenland’s icy mountains, from India’s coral strand;
Where Afric’s sunny fountains roll down their golden sand:
From many an ancient river, from many a palmy plain,
They call us to deliver their land from error’s chain.

If I am harsh on this era in writing and preaching  it is because that god of beautiful tropical idylls was brutally silenced by two world wars. The God of "dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori" died, as Wilfred Owen told us bitterly, in the first gas attack of World War One, and has stayed dead.

Theologians, artists, hymn-writers and others are slowly rumouring a different God. Black theologians like James Cone in the USA have been trying to tell us for years that the real God of Resurrection was found in the painfilled experience of their oppressed slave-ancestors, and hymned in the negro-spirituals far more effectively than in our great Victorian  Eurocentric hymns (however beautiful they might be) and canticles and anthems.

 

So if your dean bleats on and on from his soapbox (as he has been accused of doing) about a crucified God who is accessible to and biased towards the poor and the simple and the unsophisticated, it is because that bleat is a gospel imperative.  That is why we journey through Lent, that is why we allow vulnerable children to lead (as much as we are allowed) our worship, that is why we look to simplicity, rather than glorious aesthetic majesty on our journey: “For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?"

 

Let's go fly a kite, Mr Key

I rarely take a political line in my role as Dean (or any ecclesiastical role). I spent too many years in Melbourne where I saw the damage, all but irreparable, that was done when the Roman Catholic Archbishop Daniel Mannix took a stand against Communism in 1954, splitting the Labor (sic) Party and condemning the Left of politics to the wilderness for thirty years.  As a side-effect of his action he raised much public ire against the Roman Catholic Church, so that it, too, was marginalised in many social circles. Clergy for Rowling was small bacon compared to Mannix’s venture into politics (though just three years ago I was asked to take the funeral of a man who had never revisited a church since Clergy for Rowling).

This is not to say I will not speak out on issues of political significance, whether they be the politics of left or right. I have long muttered about the rights of West Papua to independence (a cause vigorously ignored by govern­ments of Left and Right), about homosexual law reform and its successor marriage law reform, about ecological and economic issues and about others matters of social justice.

But when I find Prime Minister John Key suggesting that he might use taxpayer money to bail out SkyCity’s $140+ million shortfall in building a convention centre I am almost – almost – at a loss for words. Mr Key, if media are to believed, has indicated that Sky City’s calculation has left them with two alternatives:

Option one would be to say to Sky City, 'Build the convention centre exactly at the price that we all agreed, on the conditions of the deal that we agreed', but it would be smaller I think than we had hoped and less attractive.

"Or the second option is to see if there's any way of filling that hole and to identify how big that hole is, and that's the process we're going through.”

I suggest a third option: SkyCity are an epiphytic (parasitic) organization who contribute to the destruction of the lives of those who cannot control their gambling. If out of the sheer monstrosity of their profits SkyCity can’t find a paltry $140 million then leave the tax-payer alone. It’s time SkyCity made a useful contribution to society, redress for lives sucked dry. They should pull out of the project and hand the vacant or under-developed block of prestige inner-city land to the Government. They in turn  should be duty-bound to give it back to the people: as a park. Green it over. Put a water feature in. Invite some birds to sing. Fly a kite, like Mary Poppins. Perhaps discretely place a budgeting / financial counselling centre there, but otherwise turn it to a park. Build space, build peace, build room for meaning and for the ingredients of truth so lamentably absent in public discourse.

There let human beings find peace and space amidst the chaos of commerce gone mad. At the taxpayers’ expense. I’d buy that.

 

"The cry goes up 'How Long?' "

Most of us are aware of the barbarous slaughter by Daesh this week of  young Jordanian Muslim pilot Moaz al-Kassasbeh. No words express the horror of this situation: that is precisely, if I can second guess Daesh, what these perpetrators of horror are attempting to orchestrate. We are meant to be horrified. Horror is a synonym of terror, and this is still a phase of the terrorism war into which we fell on September 11, 2001.

The picture is more complicated than that. As far back as the Fall of the Shah of Iran in February 1979, Arab and Muslim worlds were beginning to set about restructuring the arbitrary lines that had been drawn across the world by colonial powers. Long before that, in 1975, we had seen in the Oil Shock the power of the Arab world and its ability to bring what we now call the Global North to its knees. Whatever else we are seeing we are seeing the death throes of Colonial supremacy and nonchalance.

Nothing though, nothing excuses the deliberate manipulative horror of the execution of Moaz al-Kassasbeh and, previous executions, including Japanese journalist Kenji Goto. Al-Jazeera however note that the immolation of Moaz al-Kassasbeh is designed to take the horror of Daesh executions a step beyond the series of beheadings we have or heard of in recent months.

Daesh are not so dull that they did not realize that the immolation of Moaz al-Kassasbeh, young father, young husband, someone’s son, someone’s brother, would up the antagonism of Jordanian authorities. They wanted just that, we assume. Jordan has initially responded by executing would-be terrorist and suicide bomber Sajida al-Rishawi. There will be more blood-letting.

And more. And more. Blood begets blood and sin pricks on sin. Daesh knows but does not care how far these escalations will rise. They have seized the momentum and have the ball firmly in their court. They know the valleys and caves of the Levant well. It would be a brave person to say it in the field (I am unbrave, sheltering far away in a cosy office) but this cycle will break only when some Christlike breaker of hatred hammers swords into ploughshares, crying out “no more blood, no more blood.” That person will almost certainly die for her or his troubles, but only that and similar deaths will break the cycles.

We can pray. I think our prayers are likely to be stuttered, but they will be prayers nevertheless. There are injustices even in our prayers; I doubt many of us prayed fervently when US and UK troops were torturing captives in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo, and for that may God forgive us. But we can pray now despite our past failings: that the family of Moaz al-Kassasbeh and the families of other victims may find comfort. That the cycles of hatred may be broken. That justice (for there has been much injustice) for the Arab peoples may be established.

What we must not do is be drawn into cycles of vengeful hatred. However hard it may seem we must not paint Daesh in monochromes of black, nor ourselves in monochromes of white. If Hinduism can teach us one thing—and it can do more that—it is the notion that we are they and they are us. If Paul can teach us one thing it is that we all have the propensity for evil, to cauterize the human conscience, to anaesthetize human decency. Let us pray, however we understand it, the maranatha: may God’s reign come, and may we in our tiny corner be vehicles of that reign of justice and peace.